


VI. Oceanside

by notablyindigo



Series: The Better Half [6]
Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, F/M, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-26
Updated: 2014-02-26
Packaged: 2018-01-13 21:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1241155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notablyindigo/pseuds/notablyindigo





	VI. Oceanside

If she were being honest with herself, Joan would admit that she’d always thought she would be the one to leave. But in the morning she returns from her overnight shift at the hospital to an empty apartment and finds the front door key on the kitchen table. Liam’s things are gone. 

She wanders listlessly around the apartment, nudging shut drawers that Liam had left half-open as he’d packed, and eventually comes to the bedroom. She’s struck by how clean—too clean—it is without the random clutter that had followed Liam (old books, pads of paper, found objects, always deposited in some corner of the apartment with a promise that they’d be relocated to a logical place soon, which they never were). When he’d first moved in with her they’d argued constantly about the mess, until finally Joan had grown accustomed to it. (“I’m not a clean-cut guy,” he’d shouted at her once, twitchy with what she would later come to recognize as his symptoms of withdrawal. “If that’s what you want, then go find someone else.”) There was a lot about Liam she’d had to learn to be okay with.

She changes out of her work clothes, exhaustion gnawing at her back, her neck, the arches of her feet. A nap would be good, would take her mind off things in the way that unconsciousness tends to. But the bedclothes are still rumpled where Liam slept in them, and she knows the pillowcases will still smell like him—like Irish Spring soap and cigarette ash (it’s when she can’t find a trace of his smoking habit, no ashtray or stray pack of Dunhills in the apartment, that she knows he’s gone for good). So, instead, she strips the sheets from the bed, bundles them up in her arms, and walks the five flights of stairs down to the laundry room in the basement. 

Joan had never understood her college classmates’ reluctance to do laundry. To her, there had always been something soothing about clean clothes still warm from the dryer, about the repetitive motion of smoothing wrinkles, folding, and putting away. As a small child, she’d loved to lay in the basket amidst her mother’s freshly folded clothes, breathing in the smell of fabric softener, feeling small and cocooned. She’s long since outgrown the laundry basket, but the comfort she finds in the procedure of it all remains (it’s no wonder, she thinks as she measures out detergent, that she became a surgeon; procedure is the essence of her job). She turns the machine to the heavy wash setting, then trudges back up the stairs to the apartment. 

In the linen closet, she finds the sheets she’d used to use before Liam had moved in, the high thread count Egyptian cotton ones her parents had given her as a housewarming gift, which Liam had complained were too warm. Joan pulls them out from under the towels and begins making up the bed, beginning with the elaborate ballet of getting the fitted sheet on the mattress. She thinks of all the Sunday mornings she’d spent doing this with Liam, tidying the apartment while he made breakfast and crooned along with Louis Armstrong in the kitchen. Those had been the moments she’d loved, the moments that had made her want to stay, even through the erratic mood swings, slammed doors, and long absences (he was never home enough to fight). She’d thought he was worth the trouble. Clearly she was wrong. 

Joan shakes the pillows into their cases, straightens the bedskirt, and smooths the duvet—lavender, like she prefers—before laying down on top of the covers and pulling her grandmother’s knitted afghan around her body. She wonders what she’ll say to her mother—her mother, who hated Liam’s presence in her life—but can’t muster up the energy to care. As usual, her mother had seen it coming when she hadn’t. “You’re a person who likes broken things, Joan,” her mother had said after Liam’s first relapse. “And that will not do you well in the long run.” 

She thinks of the time he spent two weeks on a cocaine binge, all the while telling her he was out of town on business. She thinks of the time he filched cash from her purse and blamed it on their cleaner, how the girl had cried when Joan accused and dismissed her. She remembers how, two nights ago, he’d come home so high he couldn’t even make words, how once he’d sobered up he’d refused rehab, had knocked over the kitchen table and shouted at her that she could take him as he was or leave. 

"Good riddance to bad garbage," she says into the pillow, and holds her breath as she waits for herself to feel the words, too.


End file.
